Re: Questions about Japanese historical phonology.

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 21:40:43 +0300, Isaac A. Penzev <isaacp@...> wrote:

>Ben Poplawski jazdy:
>
>
>> With the velars, it's [-i:ta] and [-i:da] -- long vowels.
>
>No, I'm more than sure they are short.
You're right; I corrected myself above.

>> Hmm. I learned those forms as the -te forms. The plain past -ta isn't used
>> much in my experience, especially by gaijin. ;)
>
>I learnt some Japanese mostly for reading technical texts, so my knowledge
>was rather passive. But in that style plain verb forms are abundant. Surely
>in oral language a gaijin should use other forms.
Well, gaijin tend to use more polite speech: number one, they're gaijin, and
number two, from that they are not sensitive to the situations where
different speech forms are used. So it never hurts to use the polite forms.
What I learned in school, we didn't really cover the -ta forms and we tended
towards the polite forms almost all the time.

>> you
>> didn't point out the -su > -shite form.
>
>From the viewpoint of diachronic phonology it is vanilla plain clear.
Erm... how so? Especially since you put in the Group II -te forms, when,
hey, the Group IIs are as regular as it gets!

Ben